fáfnismál / freyr & the dragon

Before the sun rises, the offering is gone. Freyr steps silently to the spot where the water waned and the petals burned - the iron pot is gone, replaced by an Ægishjálmur carved deep into the earth.

He stares at it, unseeing.

Maybe it was Freyr who had drawn it, in some sleep-induced exhausted state, but when he checks his hands, they're free of dirt. The blood had been washed off in the river and stayed in the rocks of the bank, the white of his nails glints back at him, crescent-like.

Freyr looks at the marking again, so faint in the firelight, and reaches out to trace the lines. But the shape of them is all wrong. The spokes turn downwards. The eight arms curl in on themselves instead of defending, opposing instead of protecting; the runes herald Tiwaz rather than Algiz.

Tiwaz the Spear.

Freyr watches the shadow-line that the fire casts, following it to where Charlie lays asleep with his spear by his side.

Tiwaz, spear of the One-Handed God.

Charleston, son of the Gallows.

War looks up from his place across the river, where the blood he'd coated himself with drips down the ugly stump of his wrist. It pools into the dirt and stays there, the sound of the puddle echoing, dripping too loud in the quiet. The form of him grins, teeth black and bloody and broken and he raises his spear - Tiwaz, Charlie's spear, up towards the mountains. He screams a heraldry but no sound comes.

Just the blood dripping.

Freyr blinks and the figure vanishes. The spear is gone but the blood is still there. He knows because he can still smell the iron of it and feel the slickness in back of his throat.

Willem stirs beside the remnants of their fires.

Cold, probably.

Freyr stands over him with the sickle. Then with the flint. He relights the embers because it's a better kindness than slitting the boy's throat.

Then he sets the flint on Willem's pack and starts walking westwards.

The light slowly creeps up the mountain peaks until they turn the bleached-white colour of bone. For a very long time, Freyr moves across the plain while the mountains stay steady. He gets closer without getting anywhere, like the horizon is just a fixed point he can never reach. Sweat pools between his shoulders and gathers above his eyes, he runs and he runs but he covers no distance.

The trees all shake at him when he stops, panting, molten in the sunlight. His knees hit the ground and he digs his fingers into the earth so hard that his nails split.

"Brother." Freyja says.

Behind him.

Freyr turns, crouched, standing, swinging his sickle in a wide arc through a ghost.

Freyja stands there, silver and steely like the dawn, with no breeze to move the fur around her shoulders.

"It is you." She says without moving her mouth.

Freyr raises the sickle again, letting it hover between them. Sometime between the river and the run it's grown bloody again.

"You lied." He tells her, even though he knows it doesn't matter.

She only smiles.

"Father." Eirik says.

And Freyr turns faster, because even though Eirik is not nearly old enough to speak yet, he knows his voice. He knows his voice as he knows his soul. As he knows Death and War and the Great Bear - connected, as all things.

But the draugr of his son isn't there. Freyr turns and is faced with the base of the mountains, their gnarled fingers reaching upwards over him. The air gets warmer, he places a hand against the rock and feels the slow pulse of it; a heat that spreads from stone to skin to spirit.

His blood sings from it, bubbling and boiling over and he can see Tiwaz in his mind's eye still, pointing upwards.

Freyr pulls his tunic up over his head, and then starts to climb.

He only has to swerve to avoid a landslide once, and a minor one at that - a suggestion, if anything. The Gamemakers offer him a course correction and he distantly hears the sound of a lens telescoping. The air itself seems to shake and batter against the stone, like a bird throwing itself against the walls of its cage.

It looks like a swarm of them at first, like a swath of great big blackbirds that twist through the sky, spinning and turning in on themselves. Freyr stops against the cliff face and turns his face to them, watching.

They're all together too synchronized. The sound is off, like two drums slightly out of beat. Then they cluster together, entwining, creating something gigantic and terrible and thrilling.

He'd called the previous dragon Fáfnir, but he knows he was wrong now.

Freyr traces the Tiwaz runes along his sickle, thumb catching on the way they stack themselves into an alu tree.

He's surprised that he doesn't see Freyja riding on the thing's back as it approaches. It would be fitting, he thinks, for his sister to have been the one to guide the Hero-Slayer to him, to deify the last connection her child has to the mortal world.

It circles, swoops down, sends smaller creatures out from its wings to batter at him and Freyr blinks through the blood in his eyes, bares his teeth at the fire that brushes him.

He doesn't know that it's taken his hand until the sickle is on the ground and he's screaming, looking into the face of War and the two palms left between them. War takes his greyed fingers and presses them to the wound, drawing back to paint the fresh blood on his face. The dark rust turns bright, layer after layer, as Freyr's life stacks onto another's.

The dragon roars a great mechanical sound and it echos around them. Freyr stumbles against the frequency of it, tries to catch himself on a single fist.

War rises, red and glorious, and sheathes Tiwaz.

The jaws close.